Tapestry

I’m seeing…

The Lap in Luxury

In 2026, when we think of coloured threads woven together into an image of roses, unicorns, or hunting scenes (interlaced rather than pixelated), perhaps we picture it hanging on a wall in a diaspora family home. Or behind protective glass at the Uffizi or the Met. Maybe as a modern take on textile art in a small Paddington gallery. But less so on a shoe, a bag or a blazer. And yet here we are. Dries Van Noten sent out heavyweight coats covered in gilded, tapestried blooms that look like they were cut straight off a castle wall hemming in a modern day Rapunzel. Junya Watanabe too had a go, a brocade jacket thrown over jeans, and Conner Ives started with an antique tapestry embroidered with cranes and finished with collars and cuffs salvaged from old fox coats, and now all the It Girls have one. Thank you Zoë, Hailey and Kendall.

It seems tapestry is in a trending gang of romantic opulence and she's rubbing shoulders with brocade, jacquard and damask. Put together, these fabrics and techniques signal a very particular kind of luxury, from an era when red wine was drunk from pewter goblets and the man at the head of the table ate his meat straight off the bone. You could read it as a reach for wealth, and maybe it is, but it also echoes something that's been stewing in fashion for a while, which is a hunger for the handmade, the raw, and the tactile. We are thirsty it seems for a drop of the very human creativity that our AI friends, however organised, simply aren't programmed for.

The irony, of course, is that AI is probably very useful at Inditex HQ, helping Zara turn a tapestry bomber jacket from a sketch to a sample in record time. But even if the high street has its take, socially it's still aspiring to the handmade and to those practices that are so deeply human they've been practised for centuries.

But you know me. If it's couched in yesteryear, I'd rather find it in the second-hand market first. The trend itself may be tipping its hat to wealth, taste and a seat at that table, but the original lets the weight of what came before rest on its lap. So while I don't mind raising my glass to the signal, I'd rather sit down and break the bread with the story.

I’m feeling…

The Fibres of Family

The reason this fashion trend has probably piqued my interest is because I grew up in one of those diaspora homes where tapestries hung on walls of flocked velvet wallpaper no less (migrants signalling wealth, now that's a trend 😂). And whilst tapestry formed part of my backdrop it was also my practice. Those tapestries had been hand-stitched by my mum and so I learnt the craft too. And nostalgically as AI prompts me to ask how that time felt I guess it felt how any craft feels - calming, absorbing and a mental reprieve. Sat on the dining table surrounded by said tapestries and wallpaper, it was a moment of relative stillness in a time when our life was simply not that. It would have been in the middle of a school holiday day when the business of everyday life had taken a short nap and when I would sit with my mum and my little girl's sewing box pulling threads into needles and needles through a canvas. All while my grandmother was brewing some garlic-coded olive-oiled dinner in the kitchen.

It seems in my memory Yiayia was always in the kitchen, her happy place. And I'm so much like her that I've always told my husband he holds a crystal ball to how I'm going to grow old.

Three generations of women under one roof, all with our hands busy. Those quiet moments of communion are, I think, what still hold me. And maybe they're what we're all reaching for in modern life.

Mum was a meticulously organised human being (she'd give my bots a run for their money) with a penchant for accuracy and precision in things like embroidery and drawing and pastry. Her handwriting was like calligraphy and you wouldn’t find a more accurate pleat than one that came from her iron. Where Yiayia and I were, and are, loud and full and smelling of garlic, Mum was quieter, more genteel, and most importantly the thread that sewed together more than just a tapestry.

Why am I talking about this now? Maybe because it's almost Christmas, which is the anniversary of losing Mum. Or maybe it's because Jenny Walton recently talked about the influence her mum's love of quilting has had on her and her style and that connection between craft and kinship really hits close to home.

Or maybe it's because I'm about to return to my happy place, a place that lets me get away from busy life, where I spend most of the time in the kitchen cooking something garlic-coded and olive oily, and there's a tapestry hanging on the wall.

I inherited a tonne of them, and I had to choose which ones to keep and which ones to let go, but I held on to one in particular. It’s a version of Renoir's Two Sisters (On the Terrace), and it always felt like it was my grandmother and me in the picture. My grandmother, the grand matriarch, in a big hat, and me the happy little girl in her arms. It's all three of us in one frame - yiayia and me in the picture, and mum in every stitch, quietly holding us together. It’s not that pretty, the colours are a little garish, and it’s certainly not the piece that pulls together the style of the rest of the home. But it’s me, and them, in one shot and I’d rather it hang on the wall, a bit of a hot mess, than lose the threads that hold together my story.

I’m hearing…

Strings Attached

When a client brings me something ornate, like an inherited piece she can’t bear to part with, the first thing I do is stand back, ask questions and listen for the connective tissue between the piece presented to me and the woman in front of me. I want to honour both, and the work usually comes in finding a path to grounding a piece that’s lived a life in the life actually being lived right now. Whether it’s a pair of jeans, a crisp white shirt or a minimalist funnel-neck top, it usually comes back to something that stops the piece feeling like a costume from someone else’s castle and starts it feeling like someone’s own extraordinary style.

A corporate workshop I hosted once ran a lot longer than it should have, because it seemed every woman in the audience wanted to finish with a Q&A on my observations of their style. One lawyer with her hand up at the back asked me to read what her outfit said about her. My initial read: good girl, compliant, reliable, holds things together, not the centrepiece of the room. Her second question was what to do with her mother’s shirts. Her mother had recently passed away, and she’d inherited her eighties shirts, full of colour, life and her mum. Nostalgically she loved them, but style-wise they weren’t a match. So in a short chat, that’s what we worked on. Not holding on to all of them, because that’s simply the mother of all pressure, but finding the one that matched her softer colour palette and working it back into the pieces that made her feel like herself. Maybe it meant removing a shoulder pad, but by pairing it with a pleated skirt, a tailored blazer and a sensible flat, the rich texture of her mother’s life was still present in hers. Now she just got to carry it forward in the way she knew how to hold it.

And as I watch the fashion world reflect our social patterns, it seems it’s making the same statement. Matthieu Blazy has put jeans and an evening jacket front and centre on the Chanel runway, and the Met's 2027 theme, extraORDINARY, is all about the poetics of the everyday. As Andrew Bolton put it, “a pair of jeans, a white shirt, or a sweatshirt can hold traces of a life.” The extraordinary only works when it feels extraordinarily like yourself, and the ordinary is what lets you wear it to the school pick-up and not just the black tie.

Which ties me back to that dining table. I think it’s where my style comes from, and what I’m reflecting in my own practice every day. Warmth and messy abundance, with precision tailored and organised into a mastered craft. Put the two together and you get a modern-day look that signals a trend but never loses its story. A rich tapestry of life, with the strings still attached.